00:00
00:00
00:01
Transcript
1/0
The text this morning comes from
Psalm chapter 24. I invite you to turn there with
me and find that on page 458 in your pew Bibles, if you like,
as well. As you're turning there, I want to ask you a question.
What would you do if the doors in the back of the sanctuary
back there flung open wide and a man riding on a horse began
to come in? You'd probably be a little startled,
to say the least. What if I told you he was wearing
a long white robe and riding on a white horse? And I told
you that he was a king and not just a king, but the king of
kings and the Lord of Lords, the king of glory. You would
probably sit up a little straighter, nudge the person next to you
and say, hey, you better better pay attention. You might even
fix yourself a little bit. And you'd listen to every word
he had to say, you would probably hang on every syllable. If you don't find yourself moved
in worship, you might at that point find yourself moved in
worship. And I tell you. He rides in here,
he comes the king of glory, he comes this morning, he rides
on his word. The first chapter of the Gospel
of John tells us in the beginning was the word and the word was
with God and the word was God. He comes into this place. Will
you open up your minds and your hearts and your ears that the
king of glory may come in here what he has to say to us? Psalm chapter 24, beginning in
the first verse. The earth is the Lord's and the
fullness thereof. The world and those who dwell
therein, for he has founded it upon the seas and established
it upon the rivers. Who shall ascend the hill of
the Lord and who shall stand in his holy place? He who has
clean hands and a pure heart, who does not lift up his soul
to what is false and does not swear deceitfully. He will receive
blessing from the Lord. and righteousness from the God
of his salvation. Such is the generation of those
who seek him, who seek the face of the God of Jacob. Lift up
your heads, O Gates, and be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the
king of glory may come in. Who is this king of glory? The
Lord is strong and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Lift up
your heads, O Gates. and lift them up. Oh, ancient
doors that the king of glory may come in. Who is this king
of glory? The Lord of hosts. He is the
king of glory. Since the reading of God's word,
let's pray and ask that the king of glory would indeed come and
be with us. Father, we do thank you for your
goodness and your grace and your mercy to us. For your word to
us, as you send your spirit that we might understand you have
sent your son that we might see you, the King of Glory. Would
you open up our ears, give us ears to hear, hearts to receive,
minds to understand, eyes to see your King of Glory. It's in his name that we pray.
Amen. You no doubt remember Timothy
McVeigh. He was the one who in 1995 was convicted and executed
of the Oklahoma City bombings. As his last days drew to a close,
all the remaining victims and the families of the victims and
the media and all of us really wanted to know what his last
words would be. He didn't give a verbal last
statement. Instead, he wrote out a handwritten note to the
warden. And in that note, he quoted from the 19th century
poet William Ernest Henley, a poem entitled Invictus, which is Latin
for unconquered. Hear these words of the point
out of the night that covers me black as the pit from pole
to pole. I think whatever God's may be
for my unconquerable soul in the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winched nor cried aloud under the bludgeoning of
chance. My head is bloody, but unbound
beyond this place of wrath and tears looms, but the horror of
the shade. And yet the menace of the years
finds and shall find me unafraid. It matters not how straight the
gate, how charged with punishments the scroll, I am the master of
my fate, the captain of my soul. He goes on to say to write that
if it turned out that there was an afterlife, he would improvise,
adapt and overcome. How foolish we said, what a fool. How could he be so bold and brazen? Today's final statement, his
fist shaking at his creator betrays the depth of depravity. It's
hard for us to even understand how he might do that. We struggle
to make sense of it, and we say it's it's the rantings of a madman. This man is crazy. We dehumanize
him. We say he's just a small part
of humanity, wasn't thinking clearly, he was. Misled. But the attitude expressed in
that poem is an attitude rampant, not just in the serial killer.
Not just in Timothy McVeigh. That is the attitude of our hearts
as well. We rarely state this rebellion
so blatantly, so outright and so boldly and defiantly. Yet
it is seen in how we order our lives. It's seen in what we hold
most closely and what we hold most dear. What produced such
a monster in the bay is the seed which finds its home in you and
I as well. Henley's poem epitomizes one
preacher puts it the attitude not only of a big day but also
of the stubborn and headstrong toddler rejecting his mother's
request. The teenager casting aside her
father's wisdom, the student choosing to disregard God's word,
the husband walking out on his wife for the arms of another
man, another woman or man. But this song this morning. Whose
depravity reaches. But our song this morning is
a song that does not proclaim man's goal. His autonomy and
kingship, but the glory, the sovereignty, the majesty, the
kingship of God alone. After all, it is a song that
not about our our competence. It is about the Lord who rescues
incompetent people. We must see this one who rescues
the king of glory. This song celebrates God's kingship
in relationship to his people. It shows us a God who creates,
who enters into the presence of our God, who is holy. Who
processes with this one who triumphs, the God who is victorious. First, we see the God who creates,
look in verses one and two. The earth is the Lord's and the
fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein. All
the world, David tells us, is his. He's making a universal
claim about the king of glory, that every creature, the birds
that fly in the air, the sand on the seashore, every part of
his creation is his. He owns it. He has created it. And we struggle to grasp this,
what this seemingly obvious and simple statement is saying to
us, we try to understand how he can in one hand. Be the keeper
of molecules. Of the space between molecules. Of the between the between. And
yet how he can hold the universe in his hand as well. We struggle
to get our minds around it. We struggle to understand how
we can do all of that at once. How does he have the energy and
the strength? How does he have the power and
the desire? How does he have the stamina? I have a niece, she's just over
two years old, and we play this game where I take her and I throw
her in the air. She comes down and she says, do it again, do
it again, do it again. So I throw her back up and she
comes back down to do it again, again. And so I take a Tylenol
and I throw her back up in the air. She comes back down and
she says, do it again and again and again. And she realizes because
you can see the wincing in my face and she knows I'm going
to say, OK, no more, and she keeps saying it while she's in
the air and while she comes down, while she's in the air, do it
again and again and again. G.K. Chesterton has a quote about
this sort of stamina. He says, and again, I try to
stop, but once said that we should think of God like these children,
not the parent who wants to stop, not the traits of a rebellious,
needy child, but the child with unfettered energy. Listen to
what he says about children with unfettered energy, because children
have unbounding vitality because they are in spirit, fierce and
free. Therefore, they want things repeated
and unchanged. They always say, do it again.
And the grown up person does it again until he is nearly dead.
For grown up, people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough
to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says
every morning, do it again to the sun and every evening, do
it again to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity
that God makes every daisy separately, but God has never tired of making
them. It may be that he has the eternal
appetite of infancy, for we have sinned and grown old and our
father is younger than we. This is the God who rules the
world, the creation, the universe, and he does it with such vigor
and stamina. It blows our mind to not only
understand that he is he has everything that's so small in
his hand and the universe to that this is the God Of the universe. It's a song that is making that
clear to us, I mean, just think about it for a moment, they're
said to be nine to 10 million species of animals on the face
of the earth, nine to 10 million. God not only created. But he
knows. He knows them by name, he takes
delight in them and sustains them by his continued care. It's without mentioning the stars
in the sky, the planets, the universe. This is a grand and
vast God. He is the one who holds the world,
who sustains it. And if he is the one who sustains
those nine to ten million species of animals, all those amoebas
and the fleas, it stands to reason. That he takes special care of
his special creatures that bear his image, that we as the jewel
of God's creation, as he has looked upon us and said, you
are created in my image and it is good. How much more if he
takes care of the fleas and the amoebas? Will he take care of
you and I? He protects us and he sustains
us. Ancient kings used to inscribe
their names on the back of bricks. This is how we actually found
some of the kings in the Old Testament, as critics would say,
those kings didn't really exist. Some archaeologists somewhere,
as he's moving dirt around, would find a brick. He turned the brick
over and there would be the inscription of a king, his name imprinted
on the back of a brick. They put it down and they lift
up another one and there's the king's name again. In fact, the
king had placed inscribed his name upon every brick in his
kingdom, his name. How much has the more has the
king of glory inscribed his name upon us that we are his creatures,
we bear his image. And we struggle to know this
king of glory. Because he surpasses all our
understanding of intellect, knowledge and vastness and moves into the
realm of mystery, a place where we're not all that comfortable.
After all, the Enlightenment tells us we must know, we must
look, we must find, we must observe, we must see it through and through.
We must know how it works and who it is. And we get uncomfortable
because we can't wrap our minds around it, and we consequently,
because we can't figure him out. Refuse to believe because we
don't want to put our faith in one we can't comprehend fully.
And we look at God and we say, I don't understand you. Your
ways are not my ways that you're more vast than I could ever comprehend. But God simply says the answer
to that, I am bigger than you can ever imagine. I created you. You are my creature. I sustain
you. I am sovereign. And our lives bear this truth
out, too, as we face circumstances that we cannot fathom, that we
cannot see the reason for as we look at our lives, we can't
understand how it all fits together, the pain and the suffering. Why?
The Lord simply says, I am bigger than you. I am sovereign. I sustain you. I am the king
of glory. I am the God almighty. If we
are left thinking that there is no rhyme or reason that it
is all simply random occurrences of unrelated events and we are
left in despair, for if God is not in control, who is? What is our answer? But God says,
I am in control. And to the believer, he promises
more than that. That he works all things together for the good,
for those who love God and are called according to his purposes,
that he will never leave us nor forsake us. He does not promise
that you will not feel chaotic, but that he is there establishing
his kingdom against the perceived chaos itself. For after all,
look in verse two, for he has founded it upon the seas and
established it upon the rivers. Now, we have to wrap our minds
around this. To us, it just seems like he's making a an account
of creation. He's saying the Lord created
the heavens and the earth and upon the seas, he created dry
ground. But in the Hebrews mind, it meant something different
because the sea was seen as something evil and chaotic and dangerous.
More than that, it was seen that the gods, little G, in the heavens
were at war with the gods, little G, under the waters. And the
dry ground was just simply a saucer that the people were stuck floating
upon the water between these gods fighting. David is saying
that upon all of that seeming chaos, evil and turmoil, God
is establishing his kingdom upon the heads of the gods in the
midst of those gods battlefield. God is saying, I establish my
kingdom. Upon the chaos of the waters,
my kingdom stands firm out of the chaos and fear, the Lord
founded the earth and established. His kingdom is as wide as creation
itself, and we are imprinted with his image. However, if a
friend of mine puts it belonging to him by his right as creator
does not necessarily put us in good stead with. Him, this isn't
just a God who creates, but this is a God who is holy as well. Look in verses three and four,
who shall ascend the hill of the Lord and who shall stand
in his holy place? He who has clean hands and a
pure heart, who does not lift up his soul to what is false
and does not swear deceitfully. These verses speak of a very
special place, this holy hill, the one, the place that has to
be ascended Mount Zion, if it were, if you will. That this
is where God dwells upon his holy hill. No, we belong to him
by virtue of being created by him. It's not enough to simply
belong to God by virtue of creation. For the creator, God is also
a holy God. And in his holiness, he is therefore
in contrast and against unholiness, he is so holy, pure and other
that he can't look upon unholiness. He cannot look upon the sin itself.
We are unholy and impure in our answer to the question of who
may climb God's holy hill as we look at those verses, as it
says, who may ascend to the holy hill? He who has clean hands
and a pure heart, who does not lift his soul, his heart up to
idols, who does not swear deceitfully. And if you're anything like me,
you slink down in your pew or behind the pulpit. And you think,
I can't do it. I don't have clean hands. I don't
have a pure heart. We can we can cry out with Isaiah
and say, I'm a man of unclean lips. I come from a people of
unclean lips. We look at those verses and and
we're afraid. And we're undone because we recognize
our stance before this now, not only creative God, not only the
creator God, but the holy God. And we stand. Condemned. sinful, impure, unholy, and he
is against us in anger and wrath because he is against sin. We, in our sin, are his enemies. Our lives are futile apart from
him. After all, the psalm says we're
only acceptable if we have clean hands and a pure heart. And if
you're anything like me, you find yourself saying, I don't
have a Clean hands and I don't have a pure heart. It scares
us because it calls us to a moral ethic and a standard that I can't
complete fully, and I suspect neither can you. Even if I can
work outwardly to keep clean hands, Jesus tells me in the
Sermon on the Mount that if I hate my brother in my heart, I've
I've murdered him. Now my heart is impure. To lift
my soul up to all sorts of idols, to things I think will bring
me happiness and peace, to people who I think will fulfill me,
to my own risky and dark desires. And I swear deceitfully by them,
thinking that by invoking their comfort in their name, I will
find peace and happiness and solace apart from God. Furthermore,
I have spoken against my brothers and sisters for my own gain of
reputation, pride, wealth, honor. whom I belittle and put down
for my own name sake. Lord, help us. And he does. Look in verse five, after all.
That we will receive blessing from the Lord and we will receive
righteousness from the God of his salvation. There is no true
worship in life apart from what Christ has done on our behalf
as we sit here and recognize God's holiness and we're undone
even by our own sin. We realize that there's no one
created who can ascend the holy hill of the Lord. The Lord is
quick to speak to us and say to them, I give righteousness. For those who realize that I'm
undone, I can't I can't ascend the hill of the Lord, he says,
my righteousness for your unrighteousness. Who may ascend the hill of the
Lord and who shall stand in his holy place? The Lord Jesus Christ
himself, the one and only who is holy. It would be like working
in a factory factory where they work metal over and over and
over again and the fires burn. Thousands of degrees and to even
approach it from 30 or 40 feet away, you have to wear special
gear, otherwise you will be consumed by the fire itself. The Lord
has placed upon us his robe of righteousness that we now can
ascend the holy hill of the Lord. The answer to the question, who
may ascend? It's Christ and him alone. We see this king of glory
not only through the God who creates, And not only through
the God who is holy, who gives us his holiness, but also through
the God who is victorious, the triumphant one. We've already
mentioned that our God, who is holy, is at war against unholiness.
He wages war against sin, death and the evil one, all the while
turning back the clock, redeeming us, redeeming his world, keeping
and restraining sin in the world and in your life and mine as
well. He is about the business of bringing the Garden of Eden.
Now he's redeeming us. He is saving us. He is fighting
against sin, your sin and my sin, the sin of the world, the
death that that brings and the evil one himself. There is a
battle that is going on, we see it. And we being saved into fellowship
with a God who is at war with sin and death and the devil means
that we are brought to a place to be equipped like soldiers
in his army. When we come into this place
and we worship and we meet the king of glory, that is what we
are doing. That is what is happening to
us in the midst as we're working with the Lord, as he works in
us by his Holy Spirit, as we fight against the sin in our
world, in our lives and in the world. It's God who meets with
us. who equips us, who trains us
even in the midst of this place. Worship is a war cry. It is for us to see this king
of glory, to see that we as his servants, if he is in the battle,
we should expect battle as well. That we ought to be fighting
as well against sin and death and even in God's strength, the
evil one restraining sin in our lives and in the world. And as
we fight, he is with us, too. He is not a king who is some
distance away on his throne watching the war. He is a warrior king
who condescends, who comes to be with us, to come alongside
of us, to fight in and through us and to fight in and through
his church as well. He is a warrior king who leads
us and protects us with his almighty power against sin and the devil. That means we now can face the
traumatic, the disappointing, our own sin, others sin, devastation,
hurt, disappointment, evil, because the king of glory fights with
us. He leads us up the hill to ascend
to God's holy hill. And yet he comes down off his
throne to be with us in the midst of our lives as we fight and
work. He is there with us fighting
alongside of us as well. the sea of our distress and chaos,
he establishes his kingdom and our God, it says, is a victorious
God. This whole dialogue we find in
verses seven through 10 is perhaps used as a liturgical reenactment
for the people of God of the time of when David brought back
the Ark of the Covenant of the Lord to Jerusalem. You remember
what that Ark of the Covenant of the Lord represented, don't
you? The very presence of God before the people of Israel and
as David brought it back into Jerusalem, perhaps these words
were also being said. David is the one who is said
to have penned this song. And he's writing about bringing
the ark back in to Jerusalem and the people living since David
time before Christ would be reenacting these sorts of things in their
worship, at least perhaps once a year. And as they reenact this
historical scene, as they as they process up the hill from
the Kidron Valley up the hill in Jerusalem, a priest or perhaps
a choir declares the first two verses of our song. The world is the Lord's and everything
therein. And they continue as they're
going up the hill and a priest or a choir is calling out the
question of verse three, who may ascend the hill of the Lord?
And they're moving along in this reenactment. The answer comes
a man with clean hands and a pure heart. And as they approach the
temple, they call out to those inside the temple as they as
they approach the top of the hill of the Lord. They cry out
in verse seven, lift up your heads, O Gates, and be lifted
up, O ancient doors, that the king of glory may come in. Reply
from within the temple, who is this king of glory? And the answer,
again, from outside as they approach even closer, the Lord strong
and mighty, the Lord mighty in battle. Again, they call from
outside the doors and gates as they approach, lift up your heads,
O gates and lift them up, O ancient doors, that the king of glory
may come in. And as the gates are open, the
ancient doors flown wide, the answer, the question once again,
who is this king of glory? And as they're opening the doors
and the gates lift up the answer, the Lord of hosts, he is the
king of glory, the one triumphant, the one who leads his people
up the hill into the presence of God. Who is this one who may
ascend the hill of the Lord? It is Jesus Christ. Who is this
king? of glory, it is none other than
Christ himself. He enters heaven as a conquering
king and he leads us there as well. Christ, strong and mighty
in battle and the battles of the world and sin and death and
the evil one and in our worlds as well. He's waging war against
the chaos, the forces of sin and death. The God who owns all
creation is the Lord who commands the host of heaven and earth.
This warrior king who has defeated the forces of chaos and established
the order of creation, the king of the army, is also our savior. Who is now seated at the right
hand of God, the Father Almighty, and who sustains the earth and
all that dwell therein, and who is the warrior king who works
in our midst and who will come back again to utterly destroy
the evil one? Who is this king of glory? It is the son who returns to
the father and is seated at his right side. It is the one who
leads us into Father God's presence. It is the king of kings, the
Lord of Lords, the king of glory, Christ Jesus himself. Let's pray. Father in heaven. King of glory. You are the strong and mighty
one. You are the one mighty in battle,
may we lift up our heads, our hearts, our eyes, our minds,
our souls. That the king of glory may come
in. Come in, we pray. In his name. Amen.
That the King of Glory May Come In
| Sermon ID | fpc-010806am |
| Duration | 29:39 |
| Date | |
| Category | Sunday - AM |
| Bible Text | Psalm 24 |
| Language | English |
© Copyright
2026 SermonAudio.